*** README for CREATIVE COOKING ***

This work is written using Magx, an IF compiler whose expanded greatly an earlier IF programming language, AGT, written by the late David Malmberg, reflecting the state of art and standards of late 1980s IF (still called “text adventures” and the story was written with these 1980s standards, but I managed, hopefully with success, to rate this work “merciful” on the Zarfian scale.

Said that, the story file can be played with Agility, both console and gargoyle, but I warn that every flavor of Agility I have tested on this Linux box has its share of serious bugs, from not updating the second status line, losing the exit list in it, to seriously screwing the formatting.

An important note is that the title don’t fully reflect the story: indeed the initial design included interactive cooking, but after some thinking, I preferred a non-interactive cooking, mainly because the usage of cooking related verbs will have led to RAM (Read Author’s Mind) issues, and on top of it, as the wisdom of the Romans noted, “de gustibus non disputandum est”, bananas will have flied in the debate on that specific type of puzzle. This allows me to use “alien” terms for the ingredients, without much explanation on what are.

This led to another aspect of the story: is an introduction to my major WIP’s world in a sort of postquel side-story (ETA: ~2 years, knowing my slow pace in coding…), and this WIP’s theme is about “learning the ropes, really ASAP, on the ways of this strange world”, so albeit the PC know well what is what (another motive for scrapping the interactive cooking part…), the player hopefully will taste a bit the bewilderment of the PC (and player) of said WIP when confronted with the strange terms (and not only terms...) in this story.

Lastly, this work is released together with the source code, the very first complete-story Magx source code released ever, closing, hopefully, an hole in Magx documentation, I evaluate this IF language not only a marked improvement upon AGT, but also that is still viable for small IF works, if one cares about the pitfalls and issues stemming from the now-archaic 1980s IF/text adventure framework and standards Magx inherited from AGT.

A little warning: there’s a WC ;)

Enjoy my little work inside the much larger picture of the IFComp 2023, and please be gentle in your judging ;)
Piergiorgio M. d’ Errico
September 25, 2023